-----Original Message----- On Behalf Of Thomas Dalton Sent: Wednesday, September 05, 2007 3:46 PM Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Why are URLs numbered?
On 05/09/07, Mark Ryan ultrablue@gmail.com wrote:
(snip) Either way, the referencing system could use some more functionality like
this.
I don't see any reason to assign it number 2. Just leave it as number one, and put [1, p 18] in the text, linking to footnote 1.
In that example, not especially. But remember footnotes often contain comments, quotes used to back facts in the article, and other footnote-style information, here's a practical example of where you'd want it (all [X] are <SUP>):
Tony Blair was considered one of Britain's "fresh starts" when first elected Prime Minister.[1] However, by the end of his term, the consensus of political historians was that he had lost much credibility,[2] and was becoming perceived as an electoral liability.[3] His stance over Iraq and failure to delivery on many promises had lost him much goodwill over his ten year term.[4] [5]
Footnotes and cites:
[1] John Historian, ''The Blair years: A historical analysis'', pub. Harvard Press 2007, p.45: "Blair represented a fresh start to Britain after the John Major years...".
[2] CITE WEB "10 years of Blair - an posthumous assessment", ''The Independent'' 9 August 2007, p.4 - 8: "Blair's credibility steadily plummeted during 2003 to 2005"
[3] Source, see [note 1], p.57.
[4] See [note 1] - Examples of failures noted by Historian include: p.403 "Failure to successfully reform the national health service", p.511 "the ID card scandal", and p. 745 "Failure to resolve ongoing concerns over Europe".
[5] Per [note 2]: "A large part of the public never really forgave him for what was widely seen as misleading Parliament over Iraq..."
The above is "quick and dirty" and not entirely best MOS style, but shows the kind of use I see even this simple <reflink name="something" /> facility being put to. In the above usage, both sources would have needed to be fully cited multiple times, to list page numbers or wording referenced, and this is both unwieldy for editors and readers alike.
FT2.